The PaperMate American Blue wood case checking pencil is not listed on the official PaperMate ‘about us’ list of advancements they’ve made to mankind. But was the PaperMate American Blue Wood Case checking pencil that insignificant or just unlucky? Lets see.

While WW II was simmering under a couple years of European warfare, Patrick J. Frawley Jr. was leading the charge on underperforming literary utensils. Creating a better quick drying ballpoint pen, he “revitalized” the inking industry, according to the PaperMate About Us section. He had previously acquired a ballpoint pen parts maker that defaulted on its loan, and rebranded as the Frawley Pen Company.

Hailing from Nicaragua, one of the poorest countries in the world, Patrick Joseph Frawley Junior is seemingly one of the lucky few to, I’d say properly achieve the American Dream. He was born to a banker, import-export Father and a stay-at-home mother in 1923. He learned how to wheel and deal from his father and negotiated a $300,000 deal between the Panamanian government and U.S. Rubber for tires at 18. He enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and fought in WW II. He eventually went to and dropped out of college to keep working with his father.

At 23 he bought the downtrodden manufacturer for $18,000 and went on to sell over 51 million pens to what had previously been a market so disliked that you couldn’t give away prior ballpoint pens for free, said a 1955 Times newspaper. He sold the company to Gillette the same year for $11.4 million, equivalent to over $139,000,000 today after 1955 taxes.

He went on to buy shares in the Schick razor company and Technicolor Inc., became an outspoken anticommunist after Fidel Castro took over his factory in Cuba, and presented his opinion in a Catholic newspaper he founded.

Frawley also found himself as one of the first members in the American Security Council. Seemingly a pile of people that were born into money and politics that wanted better communist protection after the failure of the Korean war; feeling as though it were lost due to commie infiltrators. Though he is just one of the many people that started mass surveillance on the American public back in the day. He heavily funded a few conservative political campaigns, as well as INCA, the Information Council of America. They had a blacklist of over 6 million names that they gave to companies in hopes of weeding out commies trying to work in the private sector. You’d both be baffled and completely unsurprised at how any semi to official government funded mass surveillance programs there were, and probably still are.

He goes on to find treatment for his alcoholism and buys the hospital because of how well he felt the negative reinforcement treatment worked. He starts selling off his shares or ownerships of a few assets around now. Tries to blame the assassination of JFK, MLK, and RFK on the commies in his newspaper. Builds and buys and sells a mansion or two. And feared assassination due to reportedly being involved with “political espionage matters.” Patrick Joseph Frawley Jr., living until the ripe age of 75 in 1998, having seen the most human advancement in the history of our species, becoming a millionaire and governmental something or other, dies after lung surgery.
This pencil sent me down the most random and interesting rabbit hole by complete accident, but I’ve used better.